Iceland Effect

I have spent a whole three months teaching in UK and not written a thing. Yet I had so many insights with the work and influences – a workshop with Tommy Thompson, a lesson and talk with Alex Farkas. I read the Open Focus Brain by Les Fehmi and reconnected with my work with David Gorman. My teaching had an extra edge to it and became an easy experiment, my students learning this stuff and responding and taking responsibility for their learning.

My practice expanded, although my hours at ArtsEd have decreased and I am still in negotiation with them about my new pay scale.

I have a wonderful new band of voluntary assistants helping my hands-on work at Arts Educational Schools in both BA and MA courses in acting.

My friends from Australia stayed for a three weeks and my lodger moved back in again. My Alexander friend C has had her adorable baby – conceived by donor as she doesn’t have a partner and the biological clock was ticking fast. He stopped crying for a while with me, and looks like his Mum.

I returned to Alonnisos for a week at half term and did lots of work in the garden, levelling a piece of land and planting some bulbs and redesigning another part. It was good weather, and I swam a few times.

My swimming had stopped in London and I took 4 lessons in the violin. I have brought it over with me for this Christmas visit to Alonnisos – a wonderful instrument that I purchased for about £50 on ebay. She is worth 4 times as much and I call her Belinda. She has to put up with a lot of squeaks and scrapes but I am making some slow progress. O the joy of learning something new! I don’t find my arms ache too much. I most enjoy putting on some Vivaldi and trying to play along. Or sit in a daze bowing along to a Leonard Cohen film.....It probably sounds dreadful but no-one is listening and I am having fun.

I haven’t yet decided whether to go to Lugano for the International Congress this summer. It is a year earlier so we don’t clash with the Olympics. And the second time we are using Lugano as our venue. I usually lead a workshop and am unclear what I would do it on. Maybe something about the repetition exercise in Meisner as a way of bringing us to the present moment.....or perhaps now this new insight about Unified Field of Attention. I need to purchase my air ticket before VAT rise in January if I decide to go.

All my students at ArtsEd along with me are supposed to be lying down in semi-supine everyday and writing up their experiments as their holiday assignment. I haven’t been assiduous with this myself – I spent four days in Iceland as soon as college broke up – marvellous place. Some years ago ArtsEd had a number of students from there and one man wrote me a great paper on AT entitled the Iceland Effect . Quite right. Iceland has a slow unhurried wide open space effect on the brain. Such an easy holiday and o those Northern Lights (my main purpose for going) dutifully performed as we waited in minus 13 on a thickly frosted landscape. It requires waiting and allowing them to appear. Then two days to get here. Travelling and semi-supine doesn’t work easily. Meditations and application of the principles no problem.

I like best to lie down outside if I am wrapped up and it is warm enough, listening to the surf crashing down, the seagulls wheeling overhead. Otherwise, by the stove in the evening, the tv shouting loudly in the room above, the dog nestling up to me, maybe a cat or two....That’s what it will be today, lazy Sunday in Alonnisos......

Wizard of Consciousness

Wizard of Consciousness

Do you like that? It’s me apparently. (Not in the picture - that's Faye. Though I think she is one too.) I am not an AT teacher but a wizard of consciousness using Alexander Technique as my magic wand or book of spells. It all sounds quite thrilling – intimidating maybe to some- but made me gurgle with delight.

You might be able to tell I was at an Alexander and NLP workshop run by Annie Kaszina.

I thought it up because of my experience when I was attending the International Congress of Alexander Technique at Lugano in 2008. I just felt we were all wizards descended quietly on the world of muggles, walking around incognito. I would come down to breakfast at our little hotel every morning and see lots of fellow wizards sitting up eating their muesli or croissants, and in between a few muggles stooping low over their cereal, growling at the world......It was so lovely to witness this – that for once there were more if ‘us’ than them. Sometimes it’s lonely out there.....

The workshop was fab, not least because as usual there were quite a few teachers I knew, so another chance to catch up and swap stories. One I was amazed to discover was someone I had taught many years ago and was now in her eighth year of teaching herself. She knew my ex-husband who was also a Nicheren Daishonin Buddhist and coincidentally so is my new lodger. I liked the coincidence – the Buddhists are out to get me!

This connection or coincidences have visited again this week – at Quakers this morning I met a woman who has a house on Skopelos, the next door island to Alonnisos and knows a fellow Alexander teacher who lives there and who I’ve arranged to meet when I am over in April. O and the night before I met new friends who have a house on Skiathos, another island of the archipelago....

Perhaps there is some wizardry afoot after all.....

Teaching at Artsed has been winding up for the Easter break and I have been very inpressed with the level of acting by both BA and MA students, and dare I say, with their use patterns on stage. This Alexander stuff seems to work! Every year I video the students at the beginning of the course and at the end. For the MA’s it is a two term course, so time to video them again and compare the two. Such an eye opener for some of them to see how far they have come. And for me too. One or two have really worked at it and transformed themselves. I am very proud of them.

The other bit of wizardry this week is to have suddenly set up an Event on my ‘I like lying down in semi-supine’ Facebook Group. I invited everyone to lie down some time after 2pm today, Sunday, and put up a pic and report on where they were and what happened. I Tweeted it too, so am hoping there may be a few. Already there are 3 pix up – one of 2 year old Faye, who wanted to copy her big sister Scarlett. It is sooo cute!! That's her at the top of the page. The ultimate wizard.